When the annual FIFA iteration rolled around the following season, it was Matt Bowman’s turn - whose actual career boasted 1 professional appearance in total. As memorable as the Nathan Modest years were, the magic was lost when I realised I could do this with any team and any player (provided I continued to play on amateur and simply hammer the AI 7–0 every game, which 12-year-old me was absolutely fine with). Modest’s not-so-modest (sorry) FIFA career happened because I was 12: I liked playing the game on amateur difficulty, I liked making Sheffield Wednesday really good, and there was something equal parts amusing and magical about having a local youngster play as part of a forward pairing with Lionel Messi. Maybe even FIFA’s developers predicted this underwhelming future: his overall rating (out of 99) was only 54, and that paltry number never rose no matter how many goals he scored on his way to the golden boot in three successive years. Modest is only 27 right now, but the diligent soul updating his Wikipedia page gave up or lost interest in 2016. He played a few more times for a handful of non-league teams throughout the 2010s.
If you google Modest’s real career, you’ll find he played four times for Sheffield Wednesday. A cursory glance at the Owls’ recent history shows they have not come close to the kinds of glory I led them to on my Nintendo Wii.
Here’s the thing, though: all of that happened because I wanted it to. Nathan Modest became that hometown hero and prolific scorer and a club legend. As well as those well-known names, though, I had promising youngsters the game had generated warming my substitutes’ bench, ready to take the field for a late, fairy-tale winner in the local derby. In childhood, FIFA allowed this long-suffering Sheffield Wednesday fan to guide his boyhood club to countless Premier League titles and European glory, with a fair share of star signings along the way. They might even construct and simulate entirely fictional leagues made up of randomly-generated players and personnel.īefore we get into the magic of OotP, I should talk about my own history with sports games. Maybe they will try their hand at working their way up as a minor league manager to an MLB GM. Perhaps they will follow a single club over the course of a number of seasons. Despite this, players of these sports management game rack up hundreds, sometimes thousands, of hours in these simulations. A new player can expect to be bombarded with tables, text and stats with little to guide them or even entice them. After all, looking at a screenshot of OotP, or Football Manager, or Eastside Hockey Manager, things are hardly a visual feast. I’ve been trying to pinpoint what the draw of this game - and these types of games - really is. I’ve been playing a lot of Out of the Park Baseball (OotP) recently. The box score and report from Beede’s no hitter.
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